Hurricane Sandy stirs up thoughts of dealing with extreme weather

The devastation of Hurricane Sandy should prompt companies to take a fresh look at their policies related to extreme weather, according to this blog post from John Hyman, a partner in the Labor & Employment group of Cleveland law firm Kohrman Jackson & Krantz.

“Do you know what to do with your workers when a weather event such as Sandy aims for your workplace?” he asks.

In the new post, Mr. Hyman links to a blog entry he wrote two years ago, offering suggestions for how businesses should handle issues such as attendance and telecommuting in the event of bad weather.

Among the issues to consider:

Communication: How will your business communicate to its employees whether it is open for business or closed because of the weather? Are there essential personnel that must report regardless of whether the facility closes?

Early closing: If a business decides to close early because of mid-day snowstorm, how will it account for the orderly shut-down of operations? Which employees will be able to leave early and which will have to remain to ensure that the facility is properly closed? Is there essential crew that must stay, or is there an equitable means to rotate who must stay and who can leave?

Telecommuting: If your area has frequent bouts of severe weather, consider whether you want to allow employees to telecommute. Even if your business does not typically permit employees to work from home, exceptions for exceptional weather could potentially save you lost productivity.
Age doesn't matter

An aging work force has “far less negative impact on workers' compensation claims costs than observers may think.”

So says this story from one of our sister publications, Business Insurance, based on a report released this week by NCCI Holdings Inc. of Boca Raton, Fla.

The report “adds to NCCI research findings published in 2011 concluding that on average costs for workers aged 35 and older tend to be similar,” Business Insurance reports. (However, the firm reported last year that workers older than 35 generated higher-than-average claims costs in contrast to those for workers aged 16 to 34.)

In the new report, NCCI says it found that workers across different ages share "remarkably similar" types of workers' comp injury designations for a range of specific diagnoses.

"For example, the shares of claims due to 'sprain of neck' that were temporary total injuries are virtually identical for both younger and older workers," the NCCI report states.

Business Insurance says that among other findings, NCCI notes that injuries “due to high severity diagnoses which have historically been more common for older workers are becoming common in younger employees.”

The report also states that while employers are attempting to retain older workers they are implementing safety and loss control programs to reduce their injuries.

Tricks of the trade

Even with 12 million people unemployed, employers often say they can't find qualified workers.

And while in some fields — high-skilled manufacturing, for instance — they have a point, most of the time the claims are highly debatable, according to this story from the LifeInc. project of “The Today Show.”

Some employment experts say companies have become “overly choosy and too reliant on technology that won't always spot the best candidate,” the story notes. Rusty Rueff, a career and workplace expert for the company information website Glassdoor, calls it the “arrogance of supply.”

“(Employers have) become pickier and pickier and pickier, and what's happened is all the technology has allowed you to become even more stringent, to a fault in some cases,” he says.

Most companies “now rely on automated systems that scan resumes for keywords, automatically weeding out people who don't list a certain education level or an experience with very specific technologies,” the story notes. This winds up ruling out people who almost certainly are still qualified for the job.

However, the story notes that the resume scanners do have some benefits for both employers and jobseekers. From the story:

In such a tight job market, some companies may get 1,000 applications for a single job opening, said John Sullivan, professor of management at San Francisco State University. The prospect of actually reading all those resumes is mind-numbing, and a computer that screens applicants is preferable to even more haphazard systems.

Sullivan said he's known of managers who only looked at resumes that came in on colored paper, or rejected those he didn't believe were stapled correctly. By comparison, scanning for keywords is much more precise.

To attract employers' attention, Mr. Sullivan “recommends that people write pages-long resumes that include virtually every keyword in the job description.” But even then, he says, “you may never get flagged unless you can use your networking skills to connect with the hiring manager in another way.”